pdx/sea mini book

elizabeth turned me on to mini books and elise blaha's wonderful blog. so, when i saw that elise & her friend were hosting a week long craft challenge, i was all in and asked elizabeth to join me.

monday's word prompt was "wander." that got me thinking how i'd like to make a mini book of our portland/seattle trip last august. (turned out that it took me four evenings to make this book, so i didn't exactly get around to the other prompt words. oh, well!) i started a mini book for my 33 things list, but it's only partially done, since i have to actually complete all the items before they can go in the book. so, it was really nice to be able to start and finish this project in such a short time.



i made the cover out of a pressboard classification folder and cut up some file "out" guides to mark the start of each day of the trip with the date and a little list of things that we did. i also raided my old stash of scrapbook papers & stickers and used a few of them throughout the book, but not too much.



there are a few maps, postcards, tickets and other bits thrown in to the mix, but a lot of the pages are just photos or notes. i also printed out menus from some of the restaurants we went to.









one awesome thing that i discovered while trying to narrow down my photos, is that picasa has a really great collage feature. i set the collage size to 4"x6" and threw a few photos in to it. then, when i had the images printed, i had these great little mini collage pages. no cutting or pasting required! (although i did cut up a few of them.)

i think this one of images from pike place market turned out really nicely.



overall, this project was tons of fun! i'm already thinking up ideas for my next books.